TYT's Union Busting, A Vicious Conspiracy And The Honesty Problem
When workers at TYT came forward as a union, the company and its most prominent figures accused them of being part of a conspiracy with the boss's political opponent. This is a correction.
It’s understandable if you were confused about the union busting at The Young Turks.
It’s understandable if you were suspicious and thought it was done in bad faith; or that it wasn’t genuine and that there were other motives at play.
It’s understandable if you thought workers were part of a conspiracy with the boss’s political opponent in his bid to become a United States Representative for Congress in California’s 25th district.
You may have held these views because Cenk Uygur, Ana Kasparian and The Young Turks company account spread this false narrative on social media, weaponizing their own audience against their own workers as part of a gambit to protect the boss’s political aspirations. And his ego.
It’s understandable because you were deliberately misled.
You. Were. Lied. To.
They. Lied.
For an extended video version of this story, plus an opening ramble about dogs in the workplace, check out this episode of my podcast, Winners and Losers
Also on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods
As a former employee of TYT with a deep history at the company who was part of the organizing effort—I was laid off in early January of 2020; the union came forward in mid February—I was dismayed when the company refused voluntary recognition of the union by rejecting card check.
Card check, you’ll recall was a central plank of Bernie Sanders’s labor platform. It’s so simple it can be summarized in a tweet.
Dismay became horror as I watched TYT and its most prominent figures throw the very workers on whose time, talent and labor their careers were built under the bus by spreading the aforementioned conspiracy.
In the months that followed, The Young Turks employed virtually every union-busting tactic in the playbook, as reported in The Huffington Post, In These Times, The New Republic and Politico and it was later revealed in two filings with the NLRB that they hired two management-side law and consulting firms, which may explain why the tactics seemed so familiar. Indeed, they were tried and true examples of America’s great capitalist tradition of intentionally inflicting material and psychological harm to force workers back in their place when they step out of line.
After two months of brutal anti-worker actions, the attempt to deny the employees their rights failed and a union was successfully formed. A contract was finally ratified just recently (October 2021) after 18+ months of negotiations. Yes!
Until now, the only people in charge of the narrative were those who perpetrated the union busting. Not anymore.
Here’s a worker’s perspective from someone who was involved at the beginning.
“Conspiracy! They’re Out To Get Me! Conspiracy!”
The union came forward on February 12th.
After days of silence, the company refused voluntary recognition on February 21st.
That’s the day the conspiracy was launched.
The Shit Hits The Fan
The first salvo was when the @TheYoungTurks issued a statement about its insistence on having a second election (having rejected card check) that concluded, “The fact that IATSE has failed to respond to TYT, instead opting to issue misleading statements, suggests that there are other motives at play.”
… other motives at play.
This false insinuation was insulting to say the least, a point I voiced, but it was followed up by this tweet from Cenk, catapulting the smear:
So genuine!
Shortly after that, Ana’s elbow rained from the sky, planting the dagger of suspicion:
… done in bad faith…
… extremely suspicious.
I’m surprised that tweet hasn’t been deleted.
She would go on that night to call out Christy Smith during the Congressional District 25 Candidate Forum in a thread in which three times she aggressively questioned IATSE’s endorsement of Smith.
Hey @IATSE WHY did you endorse her!? Gross.
So, @IATSE claims to care about worker’s rights. But why are they endorsing Christy Smith when Smith refused to vote on AB 51—
You proud of endorsing her @IATSE?
Unions endorsing candidates is problematic, no doubt, but she would not have targeted IATSE had the workers at her company not been trying to join IATSE.
Why was she so intent on signal-boosting the conspiracy?
I suspect other motives were at play.
In further statements, the company issued tweets hyper-focused on the participation of the large umbrella organization IATSE, continuing to suggest that the only entities with any agency were the power players, dismissing by omission any notion that this process was initiated by workers fed up with how they were treated.
…a ploy to intimidate us and the people who work at TYT.
It was all bullshit.
The most generous interpretation I can muster is that TYT simply didn’t regard the workers’ perspective in choosing this tactic or how questioning our motives would make us feel. These attacks were deeply insulting, deeply personal, but that meant nothing because our agency meant nothing. It didn’t exist. From lofty perches on high, we were as invisible as below the clouds.
The only characters on screen were as a classic good-vs-evil faceoff:
On one side The Heroes™ led by The Politician CEO Talk Show Host backed by his Team of Cronies and Suck-Ups arrayed in battle capes against The Villains™ comprised of The Political Rival Christy Smith, the Big Bad No Good Union IATSE and the Democratic Establishment Dragon ridden by Pelosi of the Great Graft Sea, The Ice Creamed, The Mother Of Bribes.
Left out of the titanic drama was the hard-working, talented workers who got up every day to work for less than what they were worth to make the dreams of the bigwigs come true. No one ever thinks of the cape-makers.
We weren’t even worth ignoring.
That they treated us with the disdain of invisibility is proof we desperately needed a union. Our voices, our complaints, our screams had gone unheard long enough.
But that’s not the narrative TYT’s brand is built on so it wasn’t a narrative that could possibly be brought into the sunlight.
“My workers can’t be fed up with the dismal working conditions in my mismanaged company!” You can imagine Cenk screaming, dressed in a top hat and a monocle like a 19th century newspaper baron-turned politician, like The Penguin, stomping about a well-appointed parlor in a crazed furor. “No! That can’t be it!”
“No! It’s a conspiracy! It’s a scheme! A trick! A plot! A ploy! By my political opponent! By the establishment itself! It’s Pelosi! It’s my ungrateful workers! They’re out to get me! Of couuurrrrsse!”
A narrative centered on the workers’ experience would have necessitated exposure of the working conditions we were unionizing to address.
Simple, right? The truth often is.
When The Boss Is A Politician
Let’s hold our breath and swim through the shit a little deeper, shall we?
If we’re to accept the lie that the workers were part of the plot, that means that the only reason the union formed is because the boss had a dream of becoming a Congressboss. His foray into politics was THE motivating factor. Nothing else. Thus, had he not become a politician, no union activity would have ever occurred … at Rebel Headquarters … a place staffed by liberals, progressives and lefties.
Okay, since we’re all covered in slurry, the conspiracy as it was repeatedly insinuated presents two possible explanations:
We formed the union in direct complicity with Christy Smith, IATSE and the Democratic establishment.
We were too dim to comprehend the establishment forces that manipulated us into forming the union and were thus brain-dead rubes in the schemes of the boss’s rivals.
A third explanation was never offered, one the company was desperate to avoid.
Here it is:
There were ongoing workplace issues that needed to be addressed and after years of frustration, workers banded together in an act of defiance to collectively organize to demand better.
We wanted fair wages.
We wanted to end the disrespect.
We wanted to live our principles.
We wanted a voice in our workplace.
We wanted to make our lives slightly more tolerable.
Notice how explanation #3 doesn’t include Cenk’s ego, political aspirations or any kind of self-aggrandizing battles with rivals. That’s because it never had anything to do with his political career.
Our efforts began several months before Cenk launched his campaign.
I played the role of elbow-nudger. It took very little as solidarity with fellow workers trapped in a collective cage was already there. Elbow-nudging became whispered conversations, which grew louder as the circle of solidarity expanded, leading to holding the first secret meeting before work with the organizers at my apartment, a thrilling affair if you’ve never done it, which you totally should.
I had just enough chairs to pull it off but I’ll never forgive myself for the crappy coffee cake I bought to keep our hands busy and our energy up. It was the cheap stuff, all I could afford. Not enough goo. Dry bread. Yuck. Though many ate it anyway, my friends deserved better. That, so far, is my one regret. One I have vowed to rectify.
Despite my hosting fail, the winds of hope and the possibility of finally feeling respected roused our sails. My body tingled with excitement as we wrapped up. We had to hustle off to work and made sure to not all walk in at once, lest the watchful eyes of managers pick up on unapproved behavior. Talk was becoming action. That was a good day.
All of that was before Cenk ran for office. The union would have happened had our boss become a politician or not.
A couple years prior, there’d been brief contact with organizers during a time I was not working for the company but that dalliance ended after a round of firings intimidated the group into backing off.
Yes, IATSE Endorsed Christy Smith But So F*cking What
IATSE endorsing Smith was 100% irrelevant to our right to organize collectively.
Think about it: such an ill-conceived plot could only work if it were certain the company would reject the union, and considering the years Cenk spent telling a camera how important it was for workers to stand up for themselves, it was never considered a possibility.
While we knew he wouldn’t like it, no one thought the “pro-union” guy would reject the union. No one predicted the company would be so reckless with its own brand, to reveal the prior two decades of pro-worker messaging to be hypocritical or to hand his opponent the gift of being a union-buster, one willing to smear his own workers for the cause of unalloyed political ambition.
Had Cenk recognized the union voluntarily, he could have run on it. Fundraised off it. It would have been a gift to his campaign, a flag to fly proclaiming the living of principles and a call to challenge others to do the same — an example of why The Young Turks has built up such a large and loyal following.
Why, it might have even pushed his 4th placing showing from 6.6 % upwards to 6.9%, perhaps even as high as 7.1%!
Instead, it was a disastrous political and professional choice, a gift to Smith. If any theory were plausible, you’d almost think Cenk himself was in on a plot with Christy Smith, for god’s sake. I mean, Jesus.
I’d like to think it was bad advice from Cenk’s executive team, who are somehow still employed, or bad advice from the union avoidance law firms TYT hired but as King Cenk is fond of saying: The fish rots from the head down.
The workplace issues at hand weren’t unique. They were among the standard ways capitalists in the American dungeon treat workers, horrifyingly banal by how common they are and how little they are resisted.
As Charlie Kirk once shouted at Cenk at a Politicon convention, “I live like a capitalist every single day, Cenk!”
Well, Charlie, you and he are more alike than you think.
The Tactic Worked
While many saw through the bullshit, the tactic worked incredibly well.
I watched in horror as the trust of TYT’s audience was employed to disparage the workers, simply for the act of exercising their right to form a labor union.
It was shocking and heart-breaking, not just for its viciousness or its hypocrisy but for its effectiveness. Confusion, suspicion and malice spread among the TYT audience and satellite entities.
More than a few TYT viewers and perhaps some among the TYT staff were turned against the underpaid, disrespected workers who spend every day making Cenk, Ana and the other hosts look and sound good, the very people on whom their high salaries and high status dream-achieving careers are built.
Stunning.
There are numerous examples of randos picking up the narrative and running with it along with many pushing back, plus the standard chorus of Cenk and Ana trolls who permanently haunt the cursed corridors of twitter, but I’d like to point out a few satellite entities who orbit Planet TYT and how the wool was pulled over their eyes.
Jeff Waldorf, host of Waldorf Nation, formerly TYT Nation, tweeted an example of how the misleading attack was working to create confusion.
There’s that word again: suspicious.
Jeff’s a good guy and in no way am I insinuating he would support the ways TYT conducted union-busting. As a near-orbit outsider, he trusted Cenk and Ana’s take. He was right to be confused since confusion was an intended, useful outcome of the conspiracy.
The Humanist Report, a show ostensibly offering humanist reporting that is a partner channel within The Young Turks Multi-Channel Network (MCN)—meaning they pay TYT to promote their content—hosted by Mike Figueredo immediately took the company line over the worker narrative I offered when I observed he fell for the lie.
Humanist Reporter Mike regularly appears on The Young Turks to sling takes and trade yuks. Given that money and career ambitions are on the line, it serves as an example of the ways power and personal interest exert influence.
The 350K subscribers to his YouTube channel have unlikely heard the actual truth about TYT’s union-busting, if he has produced any content at all about the workers whose labor he benefits from.
Even humanists are all too human, after all.
Progressive Voice is one of Ana’s favorite channels. It’s described as the TMZ of progressive politics, hosted by the Harvey Levin of progressive politics, Sahil Habibi.
Sahil tweeted:
He also produced a video in which his analysis of the Politico article took Management’s perspective and included the comment, “Those employees, those fifteen employees. Man, y’all suck, dude. I don’t know what to tell you. You guys are terrible, man. [laughter]”
Watch for yourself (starts at 11:14):
Would the workers at The Young Turks have been insulted and disparaged in such a way if impressionable young remora YouTubers weren’t eager to feed on the misleading conspiracy mulm put out by TYT’s top figures?
And I’d like to correct the record:
Those fifteen employees do not, in fact, suck, dude. They are not terrible, man. [laughter]
With minimal, if any, vocalization from other TYT hosts and very little mention by lefty outlets save for Means TV, the story was picked up by bad faith actors on the right, including gleeful cigar daddies Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder.
The bamboozling lie that the workers were part of a conspiracy was wholly unprovable yet wrapped in a patina of plausibility and it was the only narrative available, save for my feeble tweet responses and the podcast I did on the matter on the day of Cenk’s election, March 6, 2020.
Along with Covid ramping up and usual splatter of Trump’s outrages out-outraging each other, it’s understandable how the story didn’t gain more traction on the left.
This was another useful outcome of the conspiracy.
Viewers of TYT trust what Cenk and Ana say. Their credibility tipped the trust equation in their favor. The official story pen was in their hands.
It was like a food fight broke out. Lost in the bedlam of flying squash pizza and squash burgers was the truth. No one had any idea what was going on.
No one except myself and my comrades who still worked at TYT, those of us who ate that crappy coffee cake at the first meeting, knew the actual honest story.
Considering the might of the TYT brass’s megaphone and magnifiers, we could only watch in silence as our integrity, our hard work, our years of sacrificing for The Cause and our motives were ground into paste under a bus.
We knew the truth.
And it hurt. It fucking hurt.
TYT’s Union-Busting Playbook
The four articles, for your reference:
Feb 24, 2020 - The Young Turks' Progressive Founder Urged His Staff Not To Unionize by Dave Jamieson | The Huffington Post
Mar 5 2020 - The Young Turks Union Fight Gets Nastier With Charges of Retaliatory Firing, Withholding Raises by Hamilton Nolan | In These Times
Mar 5, 2020 - The Myth of the Progressive Boss by Kim Kelly | The New Republic
Apr 4, 2020 - Inside the union campaign that roiled left-wing network The Young Turks by Alex Thompson | Politico (@AlexThomp’s tweets with Cenk’s emails)
Here’s a partial list of the tactics, as documented in the articles above. It’s also a handy How To reference for any would be union-busters out there.
As revealed in two charges filed with the NLRB, TYT hired at least two high-powered Management-side law firms — Mitchell Silberberg and Knupp; and Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, both with websites proclaiming their success and proficiency in anti-worker actions.
Mitchell et al brags about representing the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the very organization in opposition to IATSE over the severely abusive labor practices that permeate the entertainment industry. The billionaire bosses who oppress and exploit the labor of the 60,000 IATSE members currently battling to have their voices heard use the same firm TYT hired. Weird.
In addition to advertisers and venture capitalist funding, The Young Turks is funded by members, many of whom support the company because of its adherence to progressive principles. Indeed, the company dubs itself the ‘Home of Progressives.’
Does the behavior on that list reflect progressive principles?
As someone who was among the first 1000 paying members of TYT and who gave years of quality surplus value to the careers and nice cars of Cenk, Ana and the other hosts, I’m confident in saying the members of TYT deserve an honest accounting of what happened and how much, if any, of their monthly contributions has been spent on these law firms. Or on others? What did the union busting cost?
Would paying members, many not well-off with few options for progressive perspectives in the media landscape, be okay with knowing they helped fund union busting?
Do they not deserve to know the truth?
I argue yes but maybe not. One could contend that once the money is transferred, those who gave it have no claim to know how its spent. Salaries, expenses, union-busting law firms — it’s the cost of doing business!
Perhaps one of the journalists on staff should do a journalism on this story. Nudge nudge.
Correcting The Conspiracy Narrative
I’m still struggling to wrap my head around how vicious a maneuver this was and it rankles that those in charge of the narrative are the same who did the union-busting.
That’s why I’m doing this. It’s not their story to tell.
“Union Busting”
Ana Kasparian spoke about it on The Nomiki Show (starts at 36:24) hosted by Nomiki Konst on July 27, 2020, months after the dust settled.
While bemoaning how the union and the responses to it affected her personally, she claimed Nancy Pelosi was a twitter follower of TYT Union as evidence it was a Democratic party op to hurt Cenk’s political aspirations and therefore a reason to be suspicious. Pelosi doesn’t currently follow TYT Union and while I can’t prove Pelosi never followed the account, it seems exceedingly unlikely the famously unmoored and out-of-touch Pelosi would have been involved at such a granular degree. More likely, I’d suggest, is someone was using Pelosi’s avatar and it’s appearance on a timeline got past Ana’s journalistic firewall.
Besides, even if it were true, so what? The workers at TYT should give up their right to collectively organize because Nancy Fucking Pelosi followed them on Twitter?
She goes on to air-quote the phrase “union busting” indicating she did not view what the company did to its workers as union busting and continues on to proclaim indie outlets that mentioned it were virtue-signaling as some sort of “brand play.”
Look close. There’s that word again: suspicious
Given these trying times during which labor causes and awareness are ascendant, perhaps Ana will change her view that what happened at The Young Turks was indeed union busting.
Any of her Jacobin colleagues would be happy to fill her in on what union busting is, I’m sure, if she hasn’t had the time to look into the phenomenon.
A Stressful Time Among Stressful Times
I have compassion for how stressful conditions were surrounding Cenk’s campaign. Internally it stirred up a lot of uncertainty and consternation, and externally it roused a similar stripe of forces the Establishment used to defeat Nina Turner in her bid for Congress in Ohio’s 11th district.
(Nina is now a host on The Young Turks and would be the PERFECT person to confront Cenk on how he treated his workers. Nudge nudge.)
I don’t doubt the corrupt Pelosi/Schumer/Biden-led Democratic Party activated its various tools to tip the scales toward Christy Smith. Cenk was indeed the target of bad faith attacks by the mainstream media outlets. Additionally, his past misogynistic remarks and bad wanna-be-Howard-Stern jokes were brought to light, causing Bernie Sanders to retract his endorsement. The hornets were stirred.
It was a lot of stress and Ana had expended considerable energy publicly defending her friend, an act I admire and one I’m doing right now.
Someone with such a public profile faces stresses and pressures I could never comprehend so with a good faith offering of grace I posit the idea she did not realize helping her boss attack the workers her success is built on to be union busting. It’s obvious now but the conditions for mistakes and misunderstanding were rife back then. Stress obscures reality and I invite Ana to correct the record on her viewpoints.
Does she still believe the union is suspicious? Does she still think it was done in bad faith? Does she think air-quoting union-busting was misleading considering the documented tactics the company employed?
Would she like help unionizing for herself and the other hosts? I know where not to get coffee cake. Nudge nudge.
Whether she understood “union busting” to be union busting or not doesn’t change the sting the members of TYT Union must have felt having their motives publicly questioned.
I challenge her to be a better ally than she’s been to the workers whose value is siphoned into her dreams, her status and her bank account.
It’d make a great segment on her Jacobin show.
Don’t just say solidarity. Live it.
Bumpy Start, My Bumpy Ass
Cenk Uygur, in a recent video announcing the ratification of the contract, stated, “…our relationship got off to a bumpy start…”
The video is difficult to watch considering my proximity to this story. It’s riven with the heavy watch-wearing salesman tone he and the camera have so much practice producing, but I get it. He’s a politician. They spin and if their viewers trust them, they get spun.
Still, after 18+ months of negotiating, a ratified union contract is something to celebrate. Bravo TYT Union.
Little inspires me these days but the bravery and strength of my comrades in TYT Union is one of them.
In the same video he calls out other companies to do right by their workers, heralding himself as an example for other company leaders to aspire to. After my eyes unrolled from the back of my head, I applauded this.
One small lever in the battle against exploitative out-of-touch politician bosses (I’m for ending the power of all bosses, even the “good ones.”) is for a CEO to challenge their fellow CEOs to improve working conditions. It goes against Cenk and Charlie’s capitalist principles and he was forced into this corner by a cadre of fed up workers who stood up to him and refused to back down. But okay. More of that.
Cenk is in a position to lead by example and while I am rightfully skeptical he means anything he says about worker rights, he should at least set himself down this path, even if it exists merely as marketing. It would be the tiniest step he could take on a quest of redemption for the atrocious way he treated the human beings whose surplus value affords him the life and status he enjoys.
Beyond his miscarried political ambitions, I believe The Young Turks audience would have answered a call to help support the workers at TYT as they have done for years when the company pleads for funds for various causes. Plus, there’s plenty of money to be made producing pro-labor unapologetic socialist content as the success of Cenk’s nephew, the Internet’s top streamboi Hasan Piker, proves over and over.
Instead, fighting the union was akin to putting up the world’s biggest, brightest billboard with one word: HYPOCRITE
I wonder again how his team of advisors still have jobs but it’s important to remember that a fish can’t fire its own head.
The Honesty Problem & Wrap Up
My heart breaks when I imagine what it must have been like for the workers involved to have to continue working for these people during the time in which the most powerful in the company had stuffed them under the bus in a sloppy bid to protect the boss’s political hopes.
Knowing their integrity was being questioned, that their motives were considered suspicious, that a portion of the audience thought they were malicious or stupid, they still did their jobs. During this time of maximum disrespect, they still showed up and made sure Cenk and Ana continued to enjoy the fruits of their talent and labor.
I admire their professionalism and their talent. Working with them was a privilege I will always cherish. But more than anything else, it’s their warmth, patience and kindness that repairs my heart. They are good humans. They didn’t deserve to be treated this way.
Cenk Uygur’s origin story is that he used to be a Republican. He makes no bones about rejecting the conservative ideology that shaped him but if that’s the case, why does he still practice their religion?
As an avowed defender of capitalism and based on his response to his workers standing up to him, he clings to hierarchy and the domination-subjugation work relationships that have plagued humanity since the dawn of bosses. Ding ding.
Among the reasons I chose not to sign the immense NDA upon which my severance was conditioned is my right and willingness to tell this story. Honesty is everything. Nevertheless, considering what they were willing to do their workers, I operate in fear of being sued or threatened by TYT for speaking up about this. They have a lot of member money to sick lawyers on me. All I have is Barbara Streisand.
Standing up to power, standing up for what’s right, and being honest are the core values Cenk and TYT pride themselves on. These are the principles they sell to the audience and that the audience rewards them for.
It’s not unfair for the audience to expect them to also live these principles.
Like I’m doing right now. Imperfectly, to be sure, but I’m trying.
On this issue—union busting and how much member money was spent on it—TYT doesn’t have a Hank problem. It has a truth problem.
People need to know. Questions need to be asked.
The audience deserves answers.
The workers deserve an apology. Plus a whole lot more.
And my friends are finally gonna get a proper goddamn coffee cake.
Hi Hank! Thanks for sharing. I noticed some errors in the Humanist Report paragraphs. Main error is his name is Mike, not Jeff.